Banked Flames And Burned Bread
by Anti-Kryptonite
Summary: A spark can catch fire in an instant, and before Katniss ever even knew he was alive, Peeta was already on fire. / In some ways, Katniss fell in love with Peeta the minute those burned loaves of bread hit the muddy ground.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: I am SO late to this fandom - my sister tried to get me into them ages ago, but I refused to even try until the series was complete, in book AND film. It only took me about two seconds to fall in love completely. Ever since then, I've been hooked, and I cannot get enough of Everlark (and Peeta). There are so many profound insights in such a simply written series, and this is kind of just the result of me thinking of HG 24/7 for the past several months, but it was so FUN to write! I hope you all enjoy (and don't hold it against me for being so oblivious for so long)! 1st of 2 chapters...

Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended.

* * *

She stands on a chair, placed so high that the rays from the golden sun shine through the window as if to spotlight her alone. Her red dress is bright and stark in the room of beige and gray and coal dust, and the sunbeams hit her, haloing her in a sparkle of colors that fascinate his young eyes and tint her olive skin a delicate shade of orange.

The first time he's really seen her, and she's already on fire. She's already standing in front of the world, unique and special and _wonderful_.

He doesn't need to hear that the mockingjays outside are listening just as closely as he himself.

(He does not even need the later errant thought that he is just as much of a follower as those mockingjays, that he was struck silent and wondering by her voice and her presence and her sheer _will of life_ , and that eventually, he would begin to speak and sing in echo of her, to make the world love her as much as he did when those more birdlike mockingjays chorused her Valley Song.)

All he needs is the image of her bathed in bright, bold colors and her gray eyes sparkling through dancing dustmotes, and the clench in his heart as he wonders if he could ever make those colors show up on page or cookie or cake (if she can be recreated, captured somehow in his own life, small enough and mundane enough for him to hold onto, but of course, he already knows, even then, that that is impossible, because Katniss is so much _more_ than he can ever be or ever deserve).

It's simple and it's quick and a parade of peers, torturers, and doctors will tell him that love doesn't start that quickly or that young. They will explain to him that infatuation is different than love, that obsession is more dangerous than love, that pathetic lovestruck fools will only ever be disappointed. But he knows they're wrong, because didn't he see the same thing happen to all of Panem?

Katniss spoke, dressed in the cool blue that lives at the heart of all fires, and she stepped up onto a stage, and as quickly as that, the entire country fell in love with her just as surely as he did.

(But he loved her first, and this seems important to him, that he loved her when she was a child, a District 12 Seam girl, that he did not need the sacrifice and pageantry and war to make her important; she _lived_ , and that made her important to him all on its own.)

A spark can catch fire in an instant, and before Katniss ever even knew he was alive, Peeta was already on fire.

* * *

The first time he gives her bread, it's burned. (Later, she will think on the symbolism of that, will wonder how it never occurred to her that their future was already set in place, Peeta's earnest seal branded into her through still-hot loaves burning into her hands and chest as she runs home to her vacant mother and starving sister.)

She is overwhelmed and disbelieving and _awed_ to find kindness here, in her last moments of life, on the ground by a pigpen behind the bakery. To see kindness bleeding and bruised and so small standing next to the woman who should be protecting him and caring for him and nurturing that young, radiant soul.

It's strange. Of all the days in her life, all the momentous events and world-shaking revolutions, the horrible moments and life-changing losses, this day stands out the clearest in her memory. It does not fade, even after years of hunting through blistering summers and frozen winters. It does not lose any meaning, when they are put on a train together and Katniss looks at him and wonders how to best kill him mercifully. It does not ever dim or tarnish or shrink, no matter how Peeta is twisted into something unrecognizable (into pain and agony and all his worst nightmares, and she eventually realizes that it is even crueler to leave him with the _understanding_ of just how changed and twisted they made him become than to take all of it away from him entirely; but maybe that was not their cruel intention at all. Maybe Peeta is just so much stronger and more resilient and _better_ than they ever comprehended he could be).

That day lives in her memory, pulsing with hunger, sodden with rain, drenched in despair, and then warm and whole and alive, that moment when that small boy looked at her, and saw her, and did not turn his back. That moment when a boy came back out into the rain, with his cheek marred and mangled, and he gave her all he had to give (at his own expense, his own cost, and that is a mark, too, a symbol of Peeta's entire life, lived just for her, giving his all, receiving only torture in return, and if she had known then what he would have to endure, she wonders if she would be brave enough, selfless enough, enough _like Peeta_ , to turn away before he could give her the bread. She wonders if she could ever let him go so that he could live a life he actually deserves.

She wonders, but she does not think that she could. She does not think that she can ever envision a world in which Peeta is not at her side. She did it once, buried under miles of stone and dirt, drowning beneath drugs and expectations, and it nearly destroyed her. She cannot do it again.)

When she makes her list of good things and kindnesses, her list of everything to give her hope, it always starts with those two loaves of burned bread.

(It always starts with the moment Peeta gave her his heart, kneaded with bruises, burned in scorching flames, but still so nourishing and pleasant and lasting. It starts when she held that heart in her hands, and took it, and ran without ever looking back to see what it cost the boy it should have belonged to.)

Above all, she remembers the taste of the bread in her mouth, so much richer and more filling than anything she has ever eaten. She remembers that it tasted of kindness, and generosity, and hope.

She remembers that it tasted of awe.

(Because no matter how badly she has treated Peeta, no matter how much harm has come to him because of her, the one thing she _can_ say is that she has never looked at Peeta and _not_ been full of amazement. She has never looked at him, and not realized just how _good_ he is.

He has always been too good for this world, too good for her, but she does not care. She only holds onto him all the tighter, because she is selfish and because he lets her, and so she clings with everything she is to that goodness, and hopes it will rub off on her since he has so much of it to spare. He loves her, and because he does, she is not completely irredeemable.)

One day, sitting in a tree while she hunts a squirrel for her sentimental husband, she will realize that somehow, in some way, she fell in love with him the minute those burned loaves of bread hit the muddy ground.

* * *

At the parade, they set her on fire. (They set him on fire, too, but it is only a reflection of hers, her wildfire spreading to those nearest, and he has always stood too close, watched too long, dreamed too big, and so he catches alight first.) They dress her in the outward manifestation of her soul, and send her streaming through the streets, and Peeta looks at her and finds her, as he always does, absolutely radiant.

But he is closer now than he ever has been before, and he sees the fear in her eyes. He feels her desperation in the bruising clench of her hand. He tastes her uncertainty in the words she speaks.

In all the years he's watched her, dreaming and hoping and always knowing how likely disappointment was, he'd never realized, never understood, that her flames scare even her. That she stands in the midst of that inferno and cannot see clearly through the shimmering heat wafting up around her. He had never known, before, that she does not realize just how amazing she is.

So he takes her hand (because he is told to, because he wants to, because he cannot see her distress and _not_ do something to comfort her), and he does not let her pull away.

Even flames need direction. They need a ring of stones or a well-crafted oven or a candle wick to keep them steady and blazing. Without it, they rage and roar and destroy and burn to ash and char and soot.

He's always loved her. He cannot remember a time when he did not love her. He will love her forever (even when the Capitol reaches inside him and tears and rips and plucks and razes his mind to the ground and leaves his heart tiny and shrunken and scarred and struggling so hard to hold onto _anything_ real). And Peeta does not know much about love, has never seen it played out before him, has no example to follow, but he knows what he wishes for, what he dreams of.

He dreams of warm hands and loving gestures. He dreams of supportive hugs and encouraging words. He dreams of someone accepting him for what and who he is, and loving him for those things, and never hurting, never striking, never ignoring, never walking away, never leaving in want. (He dreams of a love that is defined by things one does _not_ do, rather than what one does, but he is smart and clever and good with plans, and so by filling in the blanks left by what one should never do to a loved one, he is able to deduce what he _should_ do for Katniss.)

So he offers Katniss his warm hand (cold with fear) and he encourages her with words telling her how much the flames suit her (shy and awkward because he is never as good or skilled or as _much_ as he needs to be). He tries to be everything she needs and assuage all her fears, and he wonders if he succeeded when her smile is easy and she waves a rose and a kiss to the crowds.

(She kisses him on the cheek, too, as reward, and he wishes he could be happy with it, but Katniss always shoots her target right through the eye, and she never misses, and the ache of the bruise on his cheek is familiar enough that he knows love with pain is just pain no matter how he might try to rationalize it while he lays in bed with ice over his blackened flesh and despair in his hollow heart.)

He is afraid of the flames, in that parade. He even tells Katniss that he will quench her flames if she will help him (a lie, because he could never turn off that radiant soul of hers, and she could never undo the effect she has always had on him, but sometimes a lie is helpful. Sometimes a lie is all the kindness and protection he can offer).

Sometimes, even after the parade, when flames are roaring across Panem and no one seems to see that Katniss does not _want_ to be at the heart of this inferno, when she looks as if she will burn to nothing but a shriveled husk, he is _still_ afraid of the flames.

He wants Katniss to be whole and well and glowing. He does not want her to be a wasteland of ash and soot.

He is a whiz with fires, starting them and banking them and cooking in them (because he loves them, has loved watching them and stirring them since he saw a little girl in a dress and a ray of sun that revealed her inner fire), but this is different. With Katniss, all he has are his hands and his words and his presence, and sometimes, those aren't nearly enough.

* * *

He holds the varied loaves of bread in his strong hands, turning them over and over, pointing out the green tint of this one and the crescent shape of that one. He explains all of Panem to her through this basket of bread, and she learns more during one lunch than she did in all her years at school.

"You certainly know a lot," she says, and he shrugs it away as if it means nothing. (He always does this, ignores the strengths and wonders of his own self as if they are nothing, are meaningless, value-less, as if they cannot compare to anything else, when in reality they are so much _more_. _He_ is so much more, and when Katniss breathes her last, she does not want her greatest accomplishment to be stopping the Hunger Games and overturning the Capitol; she wants the greatest thing she will ever do in her life to be proving to Peeta that he is the best person she and all of Panem has ever known.)

But Peeta _does_ know a lot. He knows enough to have a plan and to not count on her to help him with his ultimate goal. He knows enough to be able to charm the Capitol with his easy smiles and his laughing wit and his wistful anguish. He knows enough to speak a few words in that mild voice of his and to set all of the Hunger Games upside down.

(He speaks of love, and the Capitol does not care about death anymore, but about kisses in a cave and hugs beside half-eaten cheese and self-sacrificing hands untying the tourniquet on his leg. He speaks of unfulfilled wishes, and the rebellion that stopped to consider when a girl volunteered for her sister stirs and rumbles and begins to awaken from its long sleep. He speaks of not wanting to be a victor, and does more damage in one sitting than Katniss manages in a week of the Hunger Games.)

Peeta is smart and cunning and he never plans to survive the Games. (She wonders, later, why he told her about that basket of bread at all. Did he know, even then, what it would mean? Or did he simply want to talk, in what he thought of as his last days alive, about something he loves? Did he want her to listen to him and care and be interested for his sake? Or was he only passing time?

Even after years of living with him, Peeta is so much a mystery to her, a conundrum she cannot solve with a bow or an inspired speech or food on the table.)

He is wise and insightful and prepared, and when he tells her that he does not want to be a piece in their Games (when he wants to be only himself, and she will _never_ forgive Snow or Haymitch or Coin or herself for taking that away, this one small and profound wish, from her boy with the bread), she has no idea what those words will come to mean. She cannot know, could never begin to guess, just what those words will spark inside her.

(His words are like that burned bread, too hot and too black at first, unknowable, but enduring and _good_ , always meaning so much more than she realizes at first.)

So when Rue dies, murdered by a boy who should not have known how to use spears and nets for killing children, when Katniss sings to her and wants to do _something_ to honor this little girl who had so much to live for…she remembers those words Peeta spoke on a rooftop at night, while below them, the Capitol celebrated the coming of their deaths. She scoffed at the sentiment then, scorned Peeta for thinking he was better than her (and oh, she did not know him or understand him at all, and maybe that is why it takes her so very long to comprehend just how much he means to her), but now it guides her actions, commands her to pluck up flowers and make a burial bed for Rue's final sleep.

And when District 11 sends her their thanks, their acknowledgement, Katniss thinks on a basket of bread and recognizes the loaf in her hands and remembers Peeta's gentle, amusing lesson. And she lifts her fingers to the air in a salute.

(She has a nightmare, one night, years later, where Peeta did not teach her the differences between District bread, and she did not recognize this bread as anything but a sponsor gift to rally her to action, and she did not thank District 11, and an old man did not salute her and did not get brutally executed and the rebellion did not happen and Prim still died and Katniss and Peeta were trapped in the Capitol, selling their bodies for money and their souls for children's lives and their futures for their loved ones. She screams and thrashes until Peeta wakes her with his whispers and his arms and his lips, and she makes him tell her about all the different types of District breads again. If he wonders why, he does not ask, only begins to run through them all, listing ingredients and textures and shapes until she falls asleep again and dreams of Peeta baking bread for her and burning it on purpose to save her life.)

One basket of bread, placed at tables for tributes going to their deaths, but Peeta turns it into so much more.

One gift of bread, and Peeta's words in her heart (she never forgets his words; even when everything else fades, his words always remain, etched in the stone of her heart), and a revolution begins to form.

* * *

They dress her in yellow, like a candle, and he finds her beautiful and he hates the dress. Because they sent her into the Games like a conflagration and they pull her out as if all she has left to her is a single, tiny flame, burning on an exhaustible wick. They claim her fire for themselves and leave her with nothing but the whisper of light and the looming shadows it casts.

He catches her up on unsteady legs (that he does not think about, does not acknowledge, because he's supposed to be dead but he's alive, and he's supposed to be done being a part of Katniss's life but she's in his arms, and it's all so much more than he deserves that complaints are altogether too petty, almost criminal), and he wraps her up in his arms and hopes that his lips on hers, his breath in her lungs, can feed her and restore her to her rightful solar radiance.

They keep separating them, walls hastily erected to keep them apart, Avoxes walking between them, Haymitch pulling her away to whisper to her, Portia tugging him back, and Peeta wants to scream and fight and fall down on his knees, do anything to bring her back to his side, because he is so cold, so frozen, so numb, and he needs her there. Because she is so wan and pale and listless, and the last time he saw her like that, he thinks she was dying and all he had to give her were two loaves of bread. But now he has more to give, now she knows his name and she kissed him and she told him he had no competition anywhere and she risked her life for him and took a blow for him (and that is not something anyone has ever done for him, and he still cannot quite wrap his brain around it, though his heart clings to it with desperate urgency), and she would have swallowed poison rather than be without him, and she _needs_ him.

No one ever needs him. He is the burdensome third child whose artistic talents are used but ultimately redundant, whose athletic accomplishments are second-rate, whose words are used only to avert suspicion rather than start movements, whose own parents do not love him enough to protect him or care for him. (Later, doctors tell him he has low self-worth and that he looks at himself through a skewed mirror, but Peeta can never listen to them. They don't understand. They don't know him. _They_ see him through a misleading perception. They see the façade he forged and erected to keep Katniss alive—they see half of the Star-crossed Lovers, a Victor, a revolutionary hero. They do not see the baker's third son, the lying student, the pathetic boy left behind for a hunter in the woods, the murderer who is too broken to even realize when he kills a man.)

No one needs him, but Katniss looked at him and held up berries and told him _Together_ , and he cannot understand why no one will let him see her, talk to her, _help_ her.

He does not understand, until she comes out of her room on the train looking like the District 12 girl he watched from afar, so very distant and aloof and always just outside his reach. Until they walk beside train tracks and he hands her flowers and she does not meet his eye, just like all those days at the school he will never be allowed to step foot in again. Until she does not reach for his hand and she tells him she saved his life and trampled over his heart (and how can she not realize that he would have much rather lost his life and saved his heart?). Until all his dreams are proven to be the poor, pitiful delusions of a boy who reached far too close to the flames and was left with only blistered, bubbling skin.

He was so cold, and then she gave him the truth and he burns. He burns and writhes and screams in the wake of her moving wildfire, left behind to wither away with only a fading wisp of smoke to mark his passing. Smoke-like, wraith-like, he haunts a house too big for him, and visits his family only long enough to give them chills, and watches the life he wanted to live pass him by.

(Later, when the war is over and he once more lives in Victor's Village, he will paint the time in his Capitol cell. He will sketch scenes of torture and agony. He will learn to talk about hallucinations brought on by poison coursing through his veins. He will dream of a nightmare world where reality and delusion mix and mingle interchangeably and his hands drip red with blood. But the only nightmares he wakes screaming from are the ones where he lives alone between Games, unwanted and unloved and forgotten. The days he will never bring to life with charcoal or graphite or lead are the days he baked and painted and scratched at his own skin to keep himself awake because he could not face the haunting dreams alone. The one thing he will never put to paint is how empty he felt when all that stretched before him was a future of endless Games, leading children by the hand to murder and existing as a prop in front of the cameras for Katniss to kiss and hold and smile at and fading to a ghost when the cameras are gone, and promising himself he would not use the knife on his own throat for just one second more, just one moment longer, just one more day, he was stronger than this, he would not succumb, he would not open a bottle or take a shot of morphling, only paint and bake and _hurt_. Later, no matter how much time passes and how many wounds close, there are still some nightmares too big and too terrifying for him to face.)

She was dressed as candlelight, romantic and serene, (as yellow as the tracker-jackers he paints on a canvas Katniss cannot look at) and he never dreamed that yellow could be so much more painful than blood-red. He never imagined that a candle could burn so much more hotly than a nation-wide conflagration.

* * *

He brings them bread every day. She's not sure when he began, or what her mother or Prim said to make him keep coming after the first time. She's not sure why he does it (he's still as confusing, as unknowable, as he was when they were training for the Games, and it's so much easier to flee to the comforting sameness of Gale and the woods than to try to puzzle out Peeta's alien kindness). She's not sure how he can come to her house and look at her family and face her absence when he's so hollow and hurt (and out of everything she eventually forgets, everything that blurs into the terrifying montage of fears that assault her every night, she does not forget the blankness of his eyes when he took her hand, for the first time, for the cameras rather than for himself or for her).

She risked her life to save him, and she faced pus and blood and open wounds to make sure he lived, and she raised up defiance held in a cupped hand to the Capitol to bring him home again, and then she destroyed him anyway. But still he brings them bread, and every meal, her mother slices it and puts it on the table next to butter (a luxury, a delicacy, and all it took to earn it was the deaths of innocents, and maybe that's why he brings the bread, because she earned it with the figurative blood of his soul and the death of his hopes).

(She hates herself, here, now, for the first time, not because of the arrow through Marvel's throat or the tracker-jacker poison through two girls' bloodstream, or the mercy stroke to Cato, though that inevitably comes; but because Peeta gave her hope, and in return, she murdered _his_.)

The bread is different every day, sometimes hearty and wholesome, sometimes light and fluffy, sometimes flavored, sometimes filled with fruit. For a few weeks, every day he brings them bread from a different District, culinary experiments he tells Prim he's always wanted to try, and she begins to think he does not sleep either. Prim mentions his visits, her mother always credits him for the bread, Gale drops his name in veiled accusations, people in town ask after him, and she begins to think she will never escape her crimes.

She eats the bread, and wishes that it would taste like ash, like char, like blackened, burned bits. She wishes it would taste of tears or regret or guilt. If it did, she could simply stop eating it, give up bread (and Peeta and hope). But instead, it tastes like _bread_. Like nourishment. Like security. Like the safety she always felt when Peeta wrapped his arms around her (to keep her warm in a cave; to reassure her he was alive; to give her strength when heading into their final hours; to hold together her sanity while eternity passed in minute-long measurements as they listened to a child scream out his agony and watched constellations into which Peeta painted images and names and stories).

The bread tastes of everything good and wonderful, and so she cannot stop eating it. She cannot let it go. She has to have a slice with every meal, has to hold it and wonder what he was thinking when he formed it (formed and made and created, because Peeta creates and she destroys, and why isn't he thanking her for saving him from a future with her?). She wonders if he eats any of his own bread, or if it only makes him homesick for the bakery he can no longer work at and regretful for the childhood that was ripped from him too soon.

(Later, she writes down details of these Games in a memory book, and remembers that Peeta gave her the flowers of wild onions beside a train, plants she's had to find and pick to survive, has divided with Gale to keep their families breathing for another day, and the gift did not suit Peeta at all, who gives her beauty in his words and life in his creations and something so much more ephemeral and essential than simple survival. Later, she wonders if she would have been able to crush him so badly if he'd handed her bread instead.)

She sees him, occasionally, walking to town to see his family (or so she assumes; she never visits the bakery, always turns and walks the other way before he can catch sight of her), but most often, disappearing into Hamitch's house with a limp to his mismatched steps and a loaf of bread under his arm and bruises under his eyes (and life-blood falling invisibly in his wake). It takes her a very long time to understand why her nightmares are always so much worse after those brief glimpses.

So _much_ never makes sense to her. The bread, the compassion, the generosity. The hurt, the hollowness, the loneliness. (One day, it does make sense, when District 13 tattoos ink onto her arm and Haymitch bears scars from her fingernails and Gale cannot understand her anymore because Peeta has changed her so much, has alchemized her blood and soul and very self through the bread he kept feeding her. When it does make sense, when she feels that same hurt she cannot alieve, and hollowness that cannot be filled even by Prim, and the loneliness that only ever eases in Finnick's company because he understands too…well, then, she wishes for ignorance, for incomprehension, for just one more loaf of bread baked in nightmares and loneliness and love.)

But then, Peeta himself has never made sense to her.

She is a creature of survival, of needs, of action. Peeta is a being of beauty, of hope, of words that change the world. He is so good, and she is not.

But she eats the bread, and she loves every bite of it.

* * *

On the Victory Tour, he finally stops burning. She tells him _green_ and the coolness of that color soothes the blisters on his heart (and he does not think of Gale in the forest, grey eyes next to green leaves; he does not think of it because he does not need to, it is seared into his mind and his heart and he knows any hope he has is delusional and masochistic and only he can be blamed for it). She smiles at him and accepts the apology he gives her (too easily, too kindly, because he swore that he would never hurt the one he loves, but he walked away and he ignored and those are things you _shouldn't do_ ). She looks at his paintings and her eyes go sad and old and weary, and she does not let go of his hand. She listens to his speech in District 11 and for an instant there is a flash of something in her eyes when she looks at him (but no, he knows better, he has spent six months doing nothing but layering himself up in defenses against moments like this one). She screams and wakes to him in her room and does not flinch away, but grabs hold and pulls him down and wraps herself up in him (as if she trusts him, this strong, resilient girl who trusts no one and loves so few and inspires so many; as if she needs _him_ , a broken boy only alive because Katniss never accepts defeat).

The burning is gone, quenched, replaced by a comforting warmth nestled over his heart, a moist breath steady against his throat, a constant heartbeat sounding in his ear. She is there, right next to him, and he thinks that even if she does not (cannot) love him, she still needs him. He can be that ring of stones to give her boundaries, the fuel that makes her leap back into life when she is tired and beaten down. He can help her, and that is all he has ever wanted to do (that and make her happy, and keep her safe, and coax smiles to her thin lips, and love her with every particle of his being, but he does that last anyway, and if it is not quite enough, it is more than he deserves after mercy kills and berries and lies and half a year of punishing silence).

(And if he wonders, sometimes, if she only lets him into her room and her bed and her arms because he is the one that is here, because her hunting partner is back in District 12, he does not let it bother him past the constant pinch behind his breastbone. He is here, and she is here, and when he wakes with screams trapped in his throat and lead in his veins and pain screaming in his left leg that isn't even there anymore, she is alive and warm and _safe_ and that is enough.)

He is not on fire, but the country is. Cinna keeps dressing her in pastels and frills, in little girl dresses and harmless adornments, and if there is anything Peeta notices, it is color and details and tiny little things that everyone else overlooks. And he knows that they are trying to protect her. He knows that they want her to seem like the very opposite of a threat, but every night, he holds her in his arms and she is slighter, thinner, cooler.

Her fire is dying, and Peeta cannot allow that. They want to protect her, but they don't know her like he does, and they don't realize that Katniss is always more alive when she has something to fight for. Camouflage is his strength; protecting is hers.

But they do not ask him, they do not consult him, they do not listen when he tries to bring it up (he is soft and weak and an accidental Victor and the pathetic lover boy and why should any of them listen to him when they cannot even bother to tell him that his family may be dead when he gets back to that cold, empty house in District 12?). _We have a plan_ , Haymitch mutters (as he drinks away the days and cannot tell when night ends). _This is what will play in the Capitol,_ Cinna says in that soft voice of his (as if the Capitol is what matters, when every District they pass rumbles with the sparks Katniss radiates outward). _It's for a reason_ , Portia encourages him (but it's the wrong one, because Katniss needs a _cause_ , something to protect, some reason to _fight_ and _live_ ).

But Peeta swallows back the snarl in his throat, and smiles (because this is what he does, it's what he's good for, charm and deception and manipulation that leads to people dead in his wake, and they have turned him into his mother, or did he turn into her on his own, he can't quite remember, can't quite pinpoint when it happened), and nods, and goes back to slide an extra piece of toast onto Katniss's plate, try to get her to sip one more cup of hot chocolate, and feel her bones, fragile as a mockingjay's, beneath his hands.

"We could get married," she says one day, not even looking at him, and for one instant, Peeta wonders why she hates him so much. (But she doesn't hate him, he knows this, and even holed up in his house painting images of blood and death and beauty, he could never convince himself that Katniss doesn't care for him. It makes it harder, actually, to know that she cares, just enough to keep him alive, too much to put him out of his misery, but it also makes it easy to remember that she could not possibly love him, even unconsciously, because if she did, she would _know_ how much these moments, these statements, this ignorance _aches_.)

And he agrees because she is fading right in front of him, a flame in an airless room, suffocating without any oxygen, so he will be her oxygen, he will prick holes in the walls even if it means his own heart is pricked full of wounds and he breathes in the smoke all on his own.

Haymitch tries to talk to him (they always try, too late, too little, afraid that he is too weak, too sensitive). Peeta only shrugs. "She's right," he says. And then he looks their mentor right in the eye (because he is tired of being docile and compliant and _charming_ ). "I know what you're trying to do. So do it, and I'll do what I can to keep her alive until then."

(He is not stupid. He is not slow. He is observant. He sees the mockingjays painted onto walls, hears the dissent grumbled behind Peacekeepers' backs, notices the awe and the hope and the anger etched onto the faces of the crowds who watch Katniss even when he is the one speaking. He may be young, and he may be more innocent than Haymitch, and he may be lovesick, but that doesn't mean he can't recognize the beginnings of a revolution when he sees one. War has its own scent, its own taste, its own color, painted in shades of red and blue and death that looks and feels and smells exactly like the Hunger Games, only in an arena that encompasses the whole of the world.)

He ignores Haymitch's surprise, his muttered rebuke, just closes the door on his face and sits down on his bed and tries to think how best to propose to the girl he's in love with (tries to hold his shattered pieces together, tries to remind himself that it doesn't matter if his feelings are hurt, it only matters that Katniss is safe).

It's easy, in the end. Because he's warm now, and she is cold, and he has been trying to breathe life back into her with every kiss caught on camera, every giggling excuse given at parties, every hug between Districts. But it isn't enough, and he doesn't know what else to do (because he sees hope every time he opens his eyes in the night to Katniss, but she sees death because _her_ hope is Primrose, and right now, her sister is being held hostage for a nation's peace). So he bends down on a knee, and he speaks his words (every one a truth, every one rooted in sincerity, and that is what makes him dangerous, he knows, because a lie without a seed of reality is nothing at all, but one planted in truth can mesmerize millions) and knows that Katniss does not see him, does not hear him.

(Later, he will ask her _real or not real_ , and she will not know the answer to how many times he said _I love you_ , because he knows he used those words only twice, but the first time she saw only berries and cameras and survival, and the second time she saw only Snow and cameras and survival. Later, he will try to pretend that does not hurt, and she will place her palm on his cheek and tell him that she did not need his words for this because he said it every time he breathed, and he will smile for _real_ and she will kiss him, and he will feel that wound scab over and scar and fade.)

She is happy. She is incandescent. She is warm in his arms, and she eats and she dances and she talks to him and acts as if it is him and her against the world and they will surely win because nothing would dare stand against Katniss Everdeen, and Peeta is confused but happy. (He is hurt, and he is bleeding inside from the constant hope he cannot quite kill, and he is so very afraid of going back to his lonely life in the Victor's Village, and he is resigned to this life that is no more solid or rewarding than the script of a play, but he is happier than he has been since his hand fell from hers outside a train, and he will take what he can get.)

Then they get back, and Gale is tied up to a post and Katniss's face is bleeding, and she goes crazy and fights Peeta and rakes her nails down the arms she drew around her every night and does not even see him past the shredded remains of Gale's back (and of all the images from their Hunger Games that they had to watch, sitting on a loveseat instead of a throne—and if he is proud of anything, it is that for at least a few weeks, he managed to turn a sport of death into a fight for love—the one that he had clung to through these past six months, the one moment that had made his hope so stubborn and his heart so resilient, was when they lifted them onto the hovercraft and he died on a table and she screamed for him and threw herself against glass, but this was only an act too, and maybe to play it, she envisioned Gale in a situation exactly like this).

She sits with Gale all night, heedless of the snow Peeta holds to her own torn cheek (heedless of Peeta at all), and when he returns in the morning with his hope finally buried and his heart finally cowed into submission, he finds her with her hand entwined through Gale's.

 _Their_ thing. The hand-holding. The fingers entwined together. The physical connection that sometimes feels closer and more intimate than the kisses they share. It is _his_. He cannot stop staring, cannot put the bread in his arms down on the counter or wake her and send her to bed or do anything but stare. She held _his_ hand—shook it on the stage before the Justice Hall, grasped it tight in the chariot, let it drop on the train ride home, but took it almost every night on their tour, at every stop, after every speech, when he proposed to her in front of the whole world. She's reached for _him_ , searching for his hand, in every situation they've encountered.

And it means nothing. She loves Gale. She does not love Peeta. Every time she held his hand, she was wishing it was Gale's. She is not running away with him. She will stay here, with Gale, and live or die, she will fight (and she will win). Where Peeta could do nothing but keep her vaguely alight, Gale has set her on fire.

And Peeta is not burning anymore.

He is not cold. He is not warm. He simply is (and finally, after everything, this is what turns him from Peeta into nothing more than a survivor; finally, in this world where death is escape and winning is losing, he has earned the title of _Victor_ ).

* * *

They hold out the object of rebellion, these two mismatched refugees in tattered clothing, and Katniss wants to cry or laugh or maybe just sit down and hope the world passes her by completely while she tries to figure out her own reaction. Because it's bread. A tiny wafer of bread with the symbol of a mockingjay seared into it.

(Burned bread, again, still, always, following her, and how could she not know, even then, at that moment, that the universe itself was trying to tell her something? How could she not see that this rebellion would turn her into its symbol, its face, its warrior, and that Peeta would pay the price, burned and twisted and branded to raise her up on wings he created in the first place?)

It's a smart token, she thinks. Because it says everything it needs to say (even if she does not know much about this rebellion they talk about as if she is at its center), because it can be eaten quickly, all evidence gone. And yet they have not eaten it; the bones are showing through their flesh and they scarf down the food she gives them, but the burned cracker is carefully stashed back in a roomy pocket.

(Later, she looks at Coin, who tells her that she's the mockingjay. She looks at Plutarch, who tells her she's the start of the revolution. She looks at District 13, who treat her like a hero and a criminal all at the same time, and expect her to lead them to victory. She looks at all these people who want her to change their world, and she wants to scream at them for their obtuseness. She looks at them, sequestered away in their little hideout, safe from the Capitol and the Hunger Games, and she knows that they are not the rebellion she has wanted to be a part of since Snow's tiny shake of the head. She knows that they are disconnected and separate, because if they really were the rebellion, they would know.

They would know that there is no mockingjay without Peeta. That their symbol is useless and weak and worthless without the bread to hold it up and pass it along and protect it from the enemy. They would know that Katniss cannot be anything without Peeta's goodness and words to guide her, without his arms to hold her up, without his soft strength to take her heat without complaint.)

She chose Gale. She knows this, and Gale knows this, and Peeta knows this. Gale is the rebellion, and she wants to fight, wants to protect her sister and Rue's family and everyone else like that old man who didn't deserve to die, and so Gale is her choice. Peeta is the Capitol and the Hunger Games and the life of a mentor that she refuses to contemplate having to endure, and so he is her friend, and her ally, and her partner, but he is her fiancé only when the cameras are around. (And maybe, she thinks in painfully honest moments, it's easier this way, to make the decision based on Capitol versus rebellion, so that she doesn't have to think about her feelings, or try to puzzle through why she cannot imagine Gale with anyone else but she cannot envision a world where she does not get to sleep in Peeta's arms.)

It's simple, and yet it's not, because on the way home, before she hears the hum of the fence and feels the pain of her fall and spills the lies for the Peacekeepers, all she think about is that little wafer of bread. Old and stale and cracked, but revolutionary all on its own (and if Peeta is the Capitol, then why does the rebellion use something so obviously tied to the boy Panem calls the Baker's Boy? If they do not believe the love story, as Snow claims, then why do they pair him with her and listen to his words and follow his guidance?).

But she forgets the bread (and occasionally, her choice) when Peeta carries her to her room and tucks her into bed and whispers a precious word over her head as she falls into sleep. She watches the television for glimpses of the mockingjay while eating the cheese buns Peeta brings her every day, and she watches Peeta draw while contemplating nothing more drastic than the length of his eyelashes.

(Later, she will smile to remember back to these days, to the hours they spent together doing 'normal' things and learning that they could exist and get along and thrive even when there were no nightmares or Games or pressures to prove themselves. She will smile and whisper to Peeta that even when she thought she'd chosen Gale, she spent all her days with _him_ , and could not look away; and he will smile that sweet, shy smile and ask her if she wants to watch him draw, and laugh when she nods, and forget to sketch anything at all when he kisses her.)

Safe in their small cocoon, distanced from the torments inflicted on their District, with Snow far away, the rebellion almost becomes a game, an abstract thought that doesn't quite translate to reality. For a little while, her wedding and the dresses she doesn't want to wear and the poses she doesn't want to make become almost more important than the rebellion she tells Haymitch she wants to start.

Until Snow reads a card. Until her future is ripped away from her. Until she realizes that Peeta (the kind boy who never expected to live, the good man who almost died for her, the Victor who passes out bread to the hungry and carries her as if she weighs nothing and draws with a look on his face that promises whole worlds of puzzles behind his eyes) _Peeta_ will be going back into an arena (to be hunted and to go hungry and to fight and to kill and to endure what will be fodder for thousands more nightmares).

Her boy with the bread, too good for this world, too good for her, and he does not deserve this, and there is _nothing she can do_.

"This time, we try to keep _him_ alive," she tells Haymitch. "Peeta lives."

And suddenly, just like that, the rebellion doesn't matter. (She tells herself it does, she thinks of giving up her life to become a martyr and letting Peeta turn his grief into beauty once again, as he always does. She thinks of that mockingjay seared into the bread, and thinks it fitting, that he will survive and endure long after she is nothing more than blackened marks left behind to wake him, paralyzed and afraid, in the night. But in the end, all that matters is that Peeta does not die.) All that matters is training and working and exercising (and missing the sweet, gentle nature he seems to have doffed like a winter coat when spring comes) so she can keep him alive.

 _Peeta lives_ , she promises herself (and tries not to care that he will probably hate her, for dying in his place, for leaving him alive; she _doesn't_ care, because he will be alive to hate her and that is all that matters). Peeta will live and she will die, and finally her debt will be paid, she will owe him nothing more, and the world will finally be righted. He will grieve, and he will open his mouth and use his silver tongue to move a nation to revolution, and he will _live_. (Every time she eats the bread he still has time to bake, after their rigorous training sessions, at night, when he bakes instead of sleeps because she chose Gale and she can't slip into his bed, she finds comfort in the familiar taste, and in the thought that there will still be bread after she is gone, that it will continue to be baked and given out and eaten, in some small part, because of her.)

 _Peeta lives_ , she vows (and she has never failed so badly in her entire life, has never lost so much, as when she breaks this vow and lets him be taken and finds herself alone, a ghost before death because _this is not the way it is supposed to be_!) Nothing else matters, not anymore. So she lets him hug her on the train, and she shivers beneath the touch of his lips on her neck, and she pulls him into her room, and she does not think of Gale.

Thinks only of bread and mockingjays and Rue painted into bright, stirring colors on the Gamemakers' floor and sunsets on rooftops where a year before revolutionary words were spoken like tiny secrets, and when Peeta offers her a bun to dip into her hot chocolate on their last day outside the arena, she smiles at him, and is content.

(She is terrified and frightened, about to face her worst nightmares and fight every moment to make sure that Peeta lives at least a moment longer than her, and she misses her family and wishes she could have hugged Prim one last time, and she is so _furious_ at Snow and the Capitol and the world for doing this to them again…but Peeta is here, and his hand is in hers, and the bread is soft and sweet in her mouth, and this is what he does: he turns fear into comfort, hunger into sweetness, anger into peace. He makes everything better, and for once she does not fight it. For once, she simply accepts it.)

The last thing she eats, before Cinna is beaten and turned bloody and bruised in front of her, is a piece of bread.

It reminds her of Peeta. A promise. A reminder. A comfort.

A symbol.

* * *

She spins in circles, 'round and 'round, never moving from her place in front of the world, and her gown (the white wedding dress, adorned with pearls and formed of tyranny and injustice) goes up in flames. White transforms to black, pearls to alabaster ribbons under her arms, and intricate beading becomes wings lifting her up so that he almost expects her to fly away. (He always expects her to fly away, since that moment on their first day of school, always flitting just ahead of him, forever a creature of the sky while he is bound, heavy and burdensome, to the earth.)

(They burn her white dress away and leave him walking out in a tuxedo that now has no meaning, and he should have known then, should have noticed the details and planned accordingly, that they always meant to save her and never meant to use him. If he had guessed, he's not sure it would have made a difference, anyway. She's Katniss, and she's radiant, she's inspiring, she's so much _more_ than anyone else, and so of course they must save her. But he still feels stupid, walking out onto a stage in an outfit that's once again paired with hers, only now he feels naked, because what use does a mockingjay have for a bridegroom?)

So he smiles at Caesar and he plays the game (plays his part, because they still don't talk to him, still don't consult him, and he doesn't care what their plans are or why they feel confident enough to let Cinna put himself in such a dangerous position; he has his own plans and his own weapons, and he has always been so much more effective on Caesar's stage than in a Gamemaker's arena). He jokes and he shrugs modestly, and he makes the Capitol love him (the Capitol is just like Effie, misguided and surreal and so very alien, but human beneath it all and willing to act like it if anyone simply takes the time to treat them like it).

He is only Peeta, only the third son with a bad track record and a knack for deluding himself (and maybe, if he is very, very good and tries very, very hard, at inviting all of Panem to share in his delusions). He has no fire of his own, has no spark burning inside him, has nothing but a tongue that can lie and eyes that can charm and tears that can twist hearts and a heart of his own that cannot help but keep playing out this sad, twisted fantasy where the girl he loves actually loves him back.

"If it weren't for the baby," he says, because his love for Katniss is no longer enough (because no one can really, truly believe that she loves him). Because the rebellion is in the Districts, but the power is in the Capitol. Because the Capitol _can_ care, he has seen it, breathes daily because they cared enough during the last Games and spoke loudly enough and forced Seneca Crane into a corner. Because he wants everyone that is forcing Katniss back into the place of her nightmares to realize what it costs (that there is life and a future and hope and _everything_ waiting for all of these Victors, and Snow is stealing it from them all, stealing it from the Districts, even snatching it, quietly and subtly, from the Capitolites themselves).

Last time, he made them care about a love story. This time, he will make them care for an unborn child, and a future as a grieving widow, will force them to vote for Katniss and send her the gifts and back her and root for her because that is the only way they will get two survivors again (her, and his heart, because there is no baby, there will never be a baby, at least not one with blond hair or blue eyes or a baker's genes).

(Later, he will realize that he had another reason, too, that he did what he did not just for the Capitol, but for the rebellion. Because they turned her from unwilling bride to proud mockingjay, but there was surprise in her eyes when she raised her own wings, and he hates that they are making her into just as much of a parody as Snow does. He wanted them, even subconsciously, to know that she is so much more than their symbol. She is a girl, a woman, a _living being_ with thoughts and wishes and a life of her own, and he will not allow them to use her up and turn herself into nothing more than a target and a martyr—to have no other fate than Cinna.)

The Capitol erupts in a cacophonous uproar. The Victors raise their hands into the air (more people clasping hands, using this link he used to think was his and Katniss's, but this time, he doesn't mind, because they are simply burning in Katniss's flames, simply caught up in her wake; and because they are Victors, they understand, they are all kin, a family forged in death and pain and nightmares), united in defiance. The stage goes dark. Katniss does not hate him; she smiles at him and looks proud and happy and maybe even the tiniest bit hopeful.

And for just a moment, Peeta lets himself hope too. (He knows that Snow will have dark things planned for her even if she doesn't have to go into the arena, but he is in the Games now, and he only gets one wish, and he cannot think about what it costs, not now, not ever.)

But the moment passes (as they always do, whenever he lets his stubborn, foolish heart hope). Haymitch gives him a single, sobering look after their farewells (and Peeta worries, but not too badly, because Haymitch chose Katniss once before, and he will again). Effie is gone without even the chance for a goodbye (just like his family, left with nothing more than a few notes he penned on the train while past Hunger Games played in the background and his days ticked down to nothing). And Peeta is alone with Katniss.

He holds her. He tries to sleep. He fails. In a last bid, he unlooses all his own restrictions on his heart and mind and lets himself _hope_ with everything he is, everything he ever will be, that she survives these Games—as if the power of his hope alone will wipe out every danger between her and the crown of the 75th Hunger Games.

Then there is no more time, and she slips away from him, and all he has left to hold onto is a locket around his neck with pictures of a family he will never be a part of.

"Be strong," Portia tells him (there is a sob locked in her throat, he can hear it rattling in there when he hugs her for the last time). And he will be. He has always been _not quite enough_ , but for Katniss, he can be strong.

For Katniss, he can do anything (and he will, days later, when he lunges at Brutus and plunges his knife into his heart and is forever branded with the mark of a murderer).

Katniss is the mockingjay, and he will help her fly.

She is fire and heat and the spark that has the whole world watching, and he will not let her be extinguished.

But above all that, she is _Katniss_ , and he will rip out his own heart to ensure hers continues beating.

This is his purpose, for as many days as are left to him.

* * *

The sponsors keep sending bread. Katniss knows Haymitch never sends anything without a purpose. So she sees the bread, and she smiles inwardly to know that her mentor is going to keep his promise. Her boy with the bread will live.

Finnick touches the bread over and over, counts it out and apportions it to their growing number of allies. Beetee tastes the bread as if it is a puzzle rather than a staple from his home District. Johanna takes her portion without question, without noticeable reaction, and without thanks. Peeta eats it and asks Katniss if she remembers the different types of bread he tried to bake and dropped off at her house, entertains her for a few moments with laughing anecdotes about what he thinks he did wrong or what he might have done right.

"Your bread is always good," she tells him, and is pleased to see that his smile is real. (It doesn't last long, fading back into worry and exhaustion and fear, but it is there for a moment, and she is relieved because things are all right as long as Peeta can still smile at her.)

Finnick breathes life back into Peeta, as careful and methodical with him as he is with the bread. Beetee studies Peeta and nods solemnly to the questions Peeta brings up about his plan, as inquisitive with Peeta as with his portion. Johanna seems to accept Peeta without question, just as she does whatever they give her to eat. But no matter how much they get to eat, how much he smiles at her awkward compliments, Peeta shrinks more every time the arena ticks off another hour (staggers in weariness after the forcefield, flinches away from Finnick's gaze after Mags walks into the fog, trembles in Katniss's arms after walking the morphling out to sea so her body can be taken; Katniss remembers Rue, and she holds him tightly, touches him often, stays as near him as she can).

(She wants to protect him, wants to save him, and she always does this: focuses on keeping his heart beating and his lungs working and his eyes alert, and forgets that Peeta does not care about the blood in his veins. Peeta only cares about the colors of the sky and the shimmer of a butterfly's wings and the poetry of friendship. She is fixated on the physical, the necessary, the crucial; Peeta is entranced by the abstract, the ephemeral, the beautiful. She told him once that it was a weakness, but after the war is over, when she is a husk rotting away in her kitchen and he is a strong survivor planting bushes in her sister's honor, she thinks she was very, very wrong.)

"No one really needs me," he tells her, and Katniss can still taste the bread on her tongue (hearty with nuts and raisins and kindness, not bitter with salt and seawater and money with strings attached).

"I need you," she tells him (and in that moment knows only that it is the truth; later, only later, will she realize that she is a creature of needs, and it means something, means _everything_ , that Peeta is one of hers, on a short list that includes food and air and forest and _him_ ).

He protests (he always does; he never sees it, never comprehends that he is anything but expendable). The locket is tangled up in her hands and Gale's picture looks out to the Cornucopia with its necessities, and Katniss is supposed to be on watch, but her eyes are closed and her bow is on the sand behind her and her hands are tangled up in Peeta's hair, and she does not care. She kisses her boy with the bread, and breathes in that slightest hint of cinnamon (almost, but not quite, buried beneath salt and sweat and blood and bark), and finds that she is not close enough. She climbs onto his lap and feels his hands sear burning paths across her skin and she swallows up all his beautiful, stupid words, folds them up into her skin, beneath her flesh, winding through her muscles, strengthening and invigorating her.

(He shows her pictures of her family and tells her she has to go back to them, and all she can do is cling to him, so tightly even Prim is forgotten and Gale means nothing and this arena is where she will finally stop being a _survivor_. He gives her everything and sacrifices all and expects nothing, and how could she ever _survive_ when someone so _good_ dies so undeservedly? No, he will live, he must live; it is the only way she will believe there is anything worthwhile at all about this cruel, uncaring world.)

Their sponsors send them bread, the sea is alive with food, and yet with his hands setting her on fire and his mouth painting beauty into her skin, Katniss is hungry. Starving. She opens her mouth to Peeta's and lets him fill her up (as he has always done, as he will always do), and for the first time, finds that it is not enough. She needs more. She craves more. She _wants_ more.

Then lightning strikes (she should have recognized it, should have let it strike an epiphany in her heart, should have never let him go through the next day, the next months, without knowing she loves him, she loves him, she _loves him_ _and she needs him and why does no one understand this?_ ) and Peeta escorts her to bed (but does not stay, already drawing away, already trying to let her slip away from him), and that strange hunger leads her to dream of a baby with Peeta's blond hair and sparkling laughter. Of a world where safety is not a dream and a future is not an uncertainty.

She takes his pearl and dashes his hopes, and she was his enemy in the first Games because she thought she would have to kill him, and she is his enemy now because she wants to save him, and it is a strange and funny world they live in, because all the tributes were aiding her in trying to kill him last time, and now they are all aiding her in trying to save him, and all she can think of is the bread they carry with them.

Then she hears Peeta scream, and she sets the arena on fire, and Peeta burns.

The sponsors sent her bread. They sent it over and over and over again, and she thought they were telling her that Peeta would survive, that he would live, that she would get to believe in one good thing lasting after her death.

But all they were doing was trying to fill her up on bread before it was ruined forever.

All they were doing was trying to assuage their guilt. (They weren't trying to save Peeta because he is good and perfect and better than them all. They were only trying to save him to keep _her_ cooperative, and if that is not injustice, she does not know what is.)

She hates them all. She despises them. She wants to kill them (and nearly succeeds with Haymitch).

She hates herself (her fire raged once more, and once more, Peeta is the one who ended up burned). She despises herself (her dying wish, come to nothing). She wants to die.

By the time Gale tells her District 12 is as lost as Peeta, she is beyond caring.

She is starving, she is so hungry, and there is no more bread.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thank you for the welcome to the fandom! I also want to give a big thank you to my sister, who made sure I read/watched THG and encouraged me to post this story. I hope you all enjoy the conclusion to the story (even if hijacked!Peeta breaks your heart as much as mine!).

* * *

It's cold in the cell. He curls into a ball and shivers. Warmth is a distant memory that seems more dreamlike every time he reaches for it.

Johanna screams and her skin smells scorched and Peeta recites recipes to try to drown her out.

Annie rocks and rocks and rocks, her hands over her ears, and there is sweat on her brow.

Darius falls all to pieces between shattered glimpses of flames and arrows and mutts and Peeta can do nothing to help him (useless, useless, forgotten and left behind, so many more _don'ts_ for loved ones, if anyone cared about him at all).

Peeta shakes and blows shuddering breaths over his numb fingers and speaks to the others in the dark and tries to keep himself sane.

They fill his veins with acid. The room spins and glows. Katniss appears and then disappears, submerged beneath images of mutts and nightlock berries and betrayal. Snow talks to him, and Peeta tries so incredibly hard to concentrate, to plan, to be _smart_ and cunning and manipulative (to be docile and compliant and charming, because that is his part to play, it is all he is good for), but it is so _cold_ and he cannot think with ice limning his flesh and frost forming over his oozing scabs.

He is taken from his cell after eternities of horror pass, and Portia is there to dress him (there is grief in her eyes and bruises on her skin and heat in her kiss to his cheek; _Be strong_ , she tells him, but they are both just remembering who they used to be and playing long-outdated parts). He clings to the warmth of her kindness, to the fact that he is still remembered by _someone_. He talks to Caesar—once, twice, maybe again, he cannot remember, everything is blurry and fuzzy and dim around the edges. Except when he is in his cell, writhing at the liquid acid alive beneath his sallow skin, begging them to stop hurting Johanna, stop hurting Darius, he doesn't know anything, just leave them alone, don't touch Annie, she's innocent, she's harmless, oh, please, _stop, just let us die!_ Then, in those moments (those long, agonizing eternities) everything is too bright, too glossy, too sharp, too painful.

He huddles in a corner of his cell and covers his ears, and he knows but does not care that he looks like Annie (except she has sweat beading on her face, and he's so jealous, so _envious_ , that she gets to be warm and he is locked in this frozen tundra).

He is taken from his cell (he'd almost forgotten there _is_ anything outside his private hell), and Portia is there to dress him again, and she cries when she sees him. Her tears drip, drip, drip on his skin, and he cries, too, because these tiny drops are so warm they burn (and he is so criminally selfish, secretly wanting her to cry and cry and cry until she covers him in her tears and he is warm again). He hugs her, ignoring their bruises and wounds and broken bones (and he's so glad he did, because she probably needed kindness as much as he did, more even since she was shot in the head just days later).

"Thank you," he whispers, and only she could know just exactly how much he is thanking her for.

He cannot stand. They prop him up on a stool (he wants to laugh; he's always been a prop for others to use, and nothing's changed, even now when he cannot even recognize himself in the mirror). Snow stands nearby (too close, too close, _too close_ ; cold emanates from him, tinged with the scent of blood and tainted with the absence of color).

There's a script (he remembers talking about the Hunger Games, about his soul, remembers bargaining for Katniss's life, remembers feeling dirty and used; he remembers being afraid of the rebellion that played them all like pawns; remembers a warning; remembers Caesar's sad eyes as they led Peeta back to his frigid cell), and he tries to follow it. (He remembers guards talking and Snow taunting and the remnants of his once quick mind piecing clues together.) He stutters, searching for that eloquence people told him he possessed. (He remembers a girl, warm against his heart, sobbing so that her tears fell like tiny little drops of flames against his shirt, screaming until he soothed her back to sleep.) He follows Snow's cues, and tries not to earn any more pain for Johanna and Annie—and Darius? no, Darius is dead now, gone forever because Peeta isn't smart enough, isn't strong enough, isn't _enough_. (He remembers a girl on fire, and a girl in the rain, and a girl in a sunbeam, and a girl on a beach, and a girl who painted warmth against his flesh and etched ice into his heart.)

The screen in front of him flickers, and there's the girl there, standing in the ashes of a wasteland.

She's real.

(He remembers.)

 _Katniss_.

Then he speaks, a warning, a cry, a threat, and he is not cold anymore. He is on fire. He is burning. He is consumed and given up in immolation.

The boots striking his flesh spark pain that roars. The hands that form fists against his bones ignite aches that growl. The prods and the clubs and the tasers send lightning arcing across his form so that he can feel the dimensions of his body in agonizing relief. The needles come out, and the acid eats him from the inside out. (And he is still so very cold, the pain only taunting him with the promise of heat and never delivering, and he screams in betrayal.)

(He remembers a girl, and he remembers a boy, watching, watching, watching, until the girl took his hand and held it up before the crowds and laid him down as a sacrifice. He remembers her dress, sparkling with flames as she set the boy on fire atop his alter, and he only laid there and watched her, and a mockingjay flew above them and he died with the smell of burned bread clogging his nostrils.)

He remembers.

And then he doesn't.

His cell fills with a sickly sweet scent. Peeta breathes in and out evenly, letting it lull him, waiting for the beating that will surely come. People in strange uniforms enter his cell and stop when they see him, exchanging glances and muffled words he doesn't care to interpret.

 _Peeta_ , they say. _Peeta Mellark_.

"Please," he says (he is long past caring about the indignity of begging). "Please, I don't want to be cold anymore."

They talk over his head (they always do, no matter who the _they_ is) and then lift him up. He thinks he screams. He notices the sweat sheening the skin of the man carrying him, and then he falls into a frozen lake that closes over his head.

Maybe he only dreamed up the idea of warmth. Maybe there is only cold and _hurt_ and Snow (and a mutt who wants to kill him). Maybe there has never been anything else.

After all, if there's one thing he still knows, it's that he's always dreamed too big.

* * *

Peeta's gone. Peeta's gone. Peeta's gone.

They serve her food. She does not eat it. There is no bread.

They pump her full of morphling. She welcomes it. It makes everything they force-feed her tasteless.

Time passes and she has to wake and move and interact with people. She hugs Prim, even hugs her mom because she cannot summon up reasons not to, and then she hides. They tell her where to go, they tattoo it onto her very skin (like Capitolites, etching their differences onto their skin, coloring their flesh with their ideologies), and she lets the purple stain her arm, then ignores it without a second thought.

Peeta is gone.

 _The revolution is here,_ they tell her. _You're the Mockingjay._ (She can always hear the capital letter when they talk to her; they put so much faith in this symbol. Too bad their Mockingjay burned up in the 75th arena and all they got out were her bare, starved bones.) She stares at them blankly and waits until they let her leave, and then she finds a dark corner to hide in and wait to die.

(She thought she was going to starve to death once before, she remembers, and when she had huddled in a small ball in a dark place, next to a bare apple tree, a boy with blue eyes and blonde hair and too much kindness had found her. He'd looked at her, and he'd seen her, and he'd saved her. So she huddles up in dark places and waits to die; she waits for her boy with the bread to find her, and look at her, and save her.

But there is no boy with the bread anymore. He's gone. She left him behind, like she always does, and this time he's not coming back. He's dead, and if he's not, he should be, she _wants_ him to be, it's so much better than the alternative.)

She walks beneath graveyards, walks on top of them (and nearly screams at the injustice when Prim's stupid cat is alive and Peeta's family is gone, he's gone, it's not fair, why should Buttercup survive when her dandelion is burned to a crisp?), but can never find a place to lay her own bones down. She cannot find Peeta either, no gravestone to mark his passing, no coffin to grieve over, nothing but regret and self-loathing and never-ending hunger.

Prim sleeps beside her and her mother murmurs soft things and Gale watches her back and Finnick looks as lost as she feels, and Katniss does not care. Peeta is gone. She's a survivor, but surviving isn't enough on its own (she knew that before, recognized it in the first Games, standing beside a Cornucopia and looking at a boy offer to bleed out for her and bare his own heart for her aim; she knew she couldn't go home without him or she'd be trapped forever trying to find a way out, and now she knows how right she is, because she's trapped—they rescued her, but they left him behind, and she still might as well be in that broken, burned arena).

Then the screen comes alive with Peeta's face, and he is moving, he is speaking, he is _breathing_ , and suddenly Katniss is alive again (still starving, still wasting away, but breathing). He's alive, he's healthy (he's in Snow's clutches, he's a captive, he's in so much danger!), and he does not hate her. She can see his love (his forgiveness; his unconditional acceptance; his sacrifice), when he looks at the camera, when he paints them a picture with her as the innocent star, when he says her name (like he always does; like it's the best word in the entire language; like it's almost more than he should be allowed to say, as if his voice doesn't make it better than it ever could be on its own). He still loves her, and he's still in the Games, and she is not the only one trapped in the arena.

So she becomes their Mockingjay (for Peeta). She fights in their revolution (for Peeta). She pays her debts in costumes and scripts and danger (for Peeta, because nothing has changed, everything is the same as their first Games, when she played a part with Haymitch coaching her and Peeta pretended to side with the Careers to keep her safe from dangers she didn't know enough to be wary of) so that one day, when the war is over, Peeta will be safe (he makes his deals for her safety, and she makes hers for his, and he is a thousand miles away but they are still allies, still partners, still in this together, and she can all but feel his hand threaded through hers).

They dress her as a bird, and they dress him as a Victor, and together, they are puppets, dancing on the strings of tyrants.

"Do you really trust the people you're working with?" he asks her, and she doesn't, she doesn't, she _doesn't_ , because Gale is a stranger and Prim is absent and Finnick is crazy and Peeta is _hurt_ (his painter's hands shake, and his bright eyes dart aimlessly, and his merchant skin is bruised beneath makeup, and Katniss hates them all, the Capitol for doing this to someone so _good_ and District 13 for letting them do it and naming him traitor). She doesn't, but it doesn't matter, because this is the only way to save him (and when the people in the District 8 hospital ask about him, she hides her tears of gratitude that someone else _cares_ and she tells them he will be fine and wills them to convince her of it in turn).

She doesn't trust, but she hopes. It's stupid and meaningless and she should know better, but Peeta is alive and there is bread (dull and crunchy and so far inferior to Peeta's that she almost feels guilty calling it bread and _not-burned_ , but it's there nonetheless) and she cannot be the Mockingjay without hope. Hope that they will save Peeta, that his constant, steady strength will help him endure until she can reach him, that he will wrap his arms around her and chase all the nightmares of reality away as easily and softly as he did the others.

Then Snow parades him before them all (alone, without a hand to hold or someone else to offer to tear his flames away before they can burn him, without anyone else at all; he is so alone, just like after the first Games, only worse, so much _worse_ ), and he is slow and dull and stammering (and Katniss feels her heart crack, brittle and sharp enough to pierce her every time she breathes in). The makeup cannot cover up the agony, the script cannot explain away the aimless pauses, and Katniss's stupid, inexperienced hope cannot get past the madness in his eyes.

(But his words, so few, so important, so _valuable_ , are as crucial and life-saving and illuminating as they always have been. Still, again, _always_ , he saves her…at the cost of his own blood, his own pain, his own heart.)

His blood is red. His cries of pain are hoarse. His body falls onto a floor so white, as white as the canvases he always covered with so many vibrant colors (and she hates that he is surrounded by white, this boy who was alone for half a year and then chose to ask, as his first question, what her favorite color is, who loves a shade that can only be described through poetry, who comforted a dying woman with verbal color all the shades of a rainbow).

Bombs fall from the sky, lights flash over cats, ropes wear blisters in her skin, and all Katniss can see is red, red, red, on white floor, white skin, white rose.

 _You love him_ , Finnick says, and Katniss doesn't know why it matters, because he's still gone. He's still bleeding and crying and _hurting_ and whether she loves him or not will not change that.

He's gone, and it's been so _long_ since he hugged her, so when she flies to Haymitch's arms, she tries to pretend they are Peeta's. But they're not. They're not sturdy enough, not steady enough, not warm enough, not strong enough. Not enough.

But they are all she has, this and the pearl (the locket, the memories, the taste of bread, the void in her heart; her very life). So she clings to him, and she sobs, and she wishes she could switch places with Peeta (she'd do anything to take his place, to have him be the one Coin pulled from the arena and herself in that white cell, trapped with the stench of blood and roses suffocating her). The roses, pink and red (for the Star-Crossed Lovers, only there's only one now, and the other half doesn't need the roses when his blood is serving instead), tossed over the remains of District 13, just like Peeta's blood was scattered across those white floors and that transparent camera lens.

When she wakes up, Haymitch tells her they're going to rescue Peeta (going to get him, as easily as Katniss got Buttercup, scooped up and carelessly deposited in a bag to take back to his owner, as if it is nothing, as if it is merely an afterthought).

"Why didn't we before?" she asks, and Haymitch has no answer (not a real one, not a good one, not one that matters, because this is _Peeta_ and how _dare_ they not do _everything_ to get him back _before_ his blood was used as paint to cover up an empty canvas?).

She waits, and ties knots, and tries to remember the taste of his cheese buns.

She waits, and ties knots, and hopes.

But she should know better (she's done it often enough to Peeta): hope never survives. It's always strangled before it can take a breath in the light of the real world.

And she is still so very, very hungry.

* * *

She speaks, and tingles prick in his frozen fingertips. ( _Peeta_ , she says, and the new sensation hurts, a new form of torture, but when he closes those prickling hands around her throat, it doesn't stop the pain. It makes something deep inside the aching, hollow space behind his breastbone thrash and protest, but that is nothing new, it's been happening for nearly as long as he can remember, and he has to kill her, has to stop her before she can hurt him and everyone else in this place. Only, his hands can't quite close around her slender throat as tightly as they should, and he doesn't know why, it doesn't make sense, but none of this does, and now he knows he will pay for his weakness with his life.)

They put him in a white room with a door that locks, and people come in and out with needles and medicine and tasteless food (and he wonders if anything has changed at all, if he will ever be free or safe, if there is anything outside these white cells except President Snow and Katniss Everdeen). They tell him he is broken, he is damaged, he is crazy ( _useless, forgotten, left behind_ ; it all amounts to the same thing, him alone, shivering in the dark, scared, so very utterly scared, and so absolutely alone, even more so here than in his last cell).

They tell him Katniss is the Mockingjay, and she is good, and she is a hero, and they only shake their heads and ignore him (why does no one ever _listen_ to him?) when he tries to warn them she is Snow's move to checkmate them all, he's using her, she's a _mutt_. They're so wrong, so deluded and deceived, and if this is the vaunted rebellion, Peeta is disappointed.

(Later, when he sits across from Dr. Aurelius in the Capitol gathering the jagged shards of his mind and trying to reassemble them into some kind of cohesive shape, he will realize that he is still disappointed in the rebellion, in this District that watched children die and turned a girl into a warrior and screamed for Capitol blood even after the last shot had been fired and the last bomb ignited. Later still, sitting with Haymitch because Katniss is hiding in a closet again and cannot be coaxed out, he tells their mentor that there was a better way, and the old man laughs, and then smirks at Peeta's frown, and then shakes his head almost fondly. _You're an idealist, boy_ , he says, and Peeta looks away as Brutus and Mitchell and two girls, one from District 8 and the other from District 5, rise from the edges of his mind to haunt him, and finally says only, _There are far worse things to be_.)

Days pass, maybe weeks, maybe years, he doesn't know, they all drag past him, there in a blink, gone in an eternity, suffused in a constant stream of drugs and restraints and short visits from Delly and Prim and Haymitch (and he remembers Johanna and Annie being tossed into his cell every once in a while, remembers Portia's too-thin arms clamped around his aching ribs; he remembers, and he is so very afraid for his friends, but they will not listen to his warnings). They send in doctors, too; Peeta doesn't talk to them. He doesn't see the point. (He didn't talk to the doctors Snow sent in either, and there was no need, since they hardly talked either, only slipped acid through his blood and taped his eyes open to the videos they played, only calmly informed him just what damage electricity or beatings or starvation would do to his fellow captives.)

Katniss doesn't come for a long time (he thinks; he _thinks_ he would remember if she did), but Peeta isn't surprised. Snow almost never came himself either.

The videos are the worst (they were before, too, but for different reasons that he can't always hold onto). She's in them, all over the place, always with him, always hanging onto his hand, leading him around, controlling him, and Peeta's flesh crawls with terror. He wants to save his younger self, wants to reach into those screens and pull out that innocent boy before she can hurt him and leave him alone and strapped to a bed in a white dungeon. But he is powerless. Helpless. Again. Always.

( _Always_. The word rings like a song, there and gone, a melody that fades.)

Needles dripping acid in one cell; needles dripping hazy sedation in this one. Friends electrocuted and assaulted and tortured in the Capitol; friends who call him crazy and name him mutt and walk away from him here when his hands are shackled and he is flanked by guards and his mind is split down the middle. His family dead by Katniss's hand; his family dead by Snow's command. Nothing really changes. Everything is still the same, bleak and hollow and terrifying. (And he wishes Portia would visit, would look at him as if she remembered him being something _more_ and scorch his skin with her tears and recite the lines that will let them all play the parts that just maybe were more real than any of them ever knew.)

He is tired, so utterly tired. Of being a piece in their games they never explain. Of being lied to. Of not being able to trust what she says, what they say, what they tell him.

Useless. Crazy. Damaged. Forgotten.

Unneeded.

Unwanted.

He asks for pencils, for paints, for flour and oil and dye. He decorates a cake and paints pictures and tries to keep his hands steady. He recites recipes. He asks Delly and Haymitch questions. He lets them drug him up and show him more videos, because he is done with being a victim. He's done being the scared little boy who cowers and flinches and lies about his bruises, who makes up stories and imagines a world where he is loved, who does not expect to ever be saved or bettered.

There is no one else (not for him; never for him).

He will do it himself. He may be crazy, he may be useless, but he will be _himself_.

(Katniss comes, once, when he asks for her, and he is restrained and he is drugged, and he is so vulnerable, so helpless, and she is not what they told him. She is not the monster Snow said, nor the hero District 13 claims; she's only a girl, and she shrugs aside his pain and his confusion, and she leaves almost immediately, and his memories were correct, after all—there was a girl in the rain and a boy who laid himself down as offering, and she does not care; she is a mockingjay, aloof and flying far above him, leaving him behind, and he can smell the char that equates to beatings and castigation).

(She comes, and she speaks, and her voice wakes his limbs from their frozen stasis. They sting and prickle and begin to burn, black with frostbite but warming so agonizingly slowly. She comes, and he suddenly knows that he did _not_ just imagine warmth.)

One day, they take him from his restraints and his paints and his white, white cell. They dress him in gray and take him outside (and his heart leaps to his throat in elation, in terror, because he is breathing fresh air, he is so vulnerable, _she_ is there) and place a weapon in his hands.

And Peeta is suddenly, abruptly sure that he is in just as much danger now as he was during the Victory Tour (from Snow, from Katniss, from whoever the real enemy is; but this time from Coin and District 13 and whatever plan they expect him to play a part in). They dress him for the scene and place the props in his hand without the script (but if he is crazy enough to be kept in a white room with a locked door, then why are they putting him within sight of their precious Mockingjay with a gun in her hands, and training him for war?).

He's always sedated, when they want him to sleep (maybe other times, too, how can he know?). It's the only way he sleeps through the night, and apparently, Haymitch doesn't bother to tell them about nightmares, or maybe since he doesn't scream and cry, they don't realize that he is trapped in hell every time his eyes are closed. But those nights, after he sees Katniss from afar, he dreams of warmth. He dreams of something hot and small wrapped along his side, holding a fistful of his shirt, breathing against his neck. He dreams of flames licking his skin, and himself hugging it tightly to his chest.

Days pass in a blur of morphling-induced calm and muscle-aching clarity, trapped between his cell and his training. The tingles that awoke when Katniss spoke to him fade, and he slips back into a sort of cool numbness. (But he thinks on her words, and the differing videos shown him by both sets of doctors, and he remembers that a lie is only effective if planted in the truth, and he _tries_ to sort it all out, but it's a sea of confusion, a jungle of entrapping fears, a forest of bleeding wounds.)

Eventually, he asks after Katniss, because if she is the key to his wounded mind, he needs to confront her and label her and sort her facades into memory or delusion. When they tell him she's gone to the Capitol, he goes into a rage (though he doesn't know why, or why he feels abruptly afraid, or why he flashes instantly, painfully cold again). When they take him from his cell and give him a black uniform (to match a Mockingjay's, so that when they stand on stage before the cameras, they will be paired in the eyes of all who see them) and load him on a hovercraft, he wants to cry. He wants to scream. He wants to fight and wound. Because he has been fighting as hard as he possibly can to find himself, to _be_ himself, and none of it matters at _all_.

Once more, yet again, he is a puppet. A pawn. A piece, moved to counter someone else's play, these giants who rend the earth with war and never care to count the cost.

And here he is, with Katniss once more, an arrow aimed at his heart, confusion in her eyes, and all Peeta has left to cling to is a name they have turned into a title and a home that doesn't even exist anymore.

They hate him. They guard him, waiting until he is the most defenseless so they can strike (can beat and kick and shock and cut and tear and _wound_ ). They help him, answering his questions (taking his questions and his confusion and slowly, carefully, unbending them, shaping them, forming them into some kind of pattern).

"You saved a lot of lives," Jackson tells him, and Peeta is so confused it takes him a couple hours of tying knots in Finnick's rope to sort that one out.

Portia's last hug. The hours it had taken her to make him look halfway alive (he wishes he could make her look alive, too, but he doesn't even need to ask to know she is dead, all because of him; because of Cinna and this rebellion and District 13 who didn't rescue her or his prep team or Effie or his family). Snow, so close Peeta could smell the blood-soaked roses. The screen where Katniss walked atop the bones of his family and told him he could never go home again.

The warning he's thought he dreamed giving.

 _You saved a lot of lives_ , Jackson said, and the words do not warm him, but they do…something. They make him sit up just a bit straighter. Make it a bit easier to meet the others' eyes. (Useless, powerless, helpless, forgotten, but maybe he is still needed, even just a little bit.)

So he asks another question, this time to Katniss (because if he is needed, then maybe he can be brave, too).

And her words don't just simmer inside him. They explode. They burn. They start that tingling in his hands and move to his arms, from his feet to his legs; sweat sheens on his brow, makes his hands slip on the rope. It's warmth and it comes too quickly, too furiously, roaring up to engulf him. It consumes him so that he almost doesn't even notice Katniss hiding herself away (he thinks, for some reason, that he's used to her running away from him, and that idea astounds him, too, that he can set the hunter to flee; that _she_ is afraid of _him_ ).

(Later, in a house in Victor's Village, holed up while storms rage outside the window, he asks her why she chose those specific things to say. _Baking and shoelaces and favorite colors?_ he asks. _Why were they so important?_ He knows why they matter to _him_ , but why did they matter to _her_? She traces her fingers over his face, along the curve of his brow and the slope of his cheek and the angle of his jaw. _Because,_ she says in that soft, straightforward way he loves, _it's you. Everything about you is important._ )

He asks, they answer, he tries to make the _real_ answers fit into the constantly shifting landscape of his broken mind. Confusion and exhaustion and terror replaced by resentment and loss, and over it all, an aching loneliness as he sleeps alone where they can all see him, a lunatic on display. But still he asks, and listens, and sorts, and tries to remember who he is (who _she_ is, what she means to him, if she is the girl in the rain and the sunbeam or the girl with the bow and the fire, or some strange mixture of them both).

Useless. All of it. What does any of it even matter?

It's not enough. ( _He's_ not enough.)

He's warm. He's not cold, not frozen, and he's breathing in fresh air and he's surrounded by people he thinks could be ( _are_?) friends and he's _trying_ , and none of it matters in the end. None of it saves him (saves an innocent man who was only trying to help and save and protect).

There's gunfire, and explosions, and people running. There's blood, red on white stones, and body parts falling away, and he's back in the cell. He's back in the Games. He's in danger, so much danger, and Katniss is dragging a body behind her, grotesque and violent, and there's a bow in her hand and arrows on her back, and Peeta only wants to save them, these people that are his team, his allies, who answer his questions and tell him he matters.

And he wakes up, and he's staring at another screen, only this video is worse than all the rest put together.

This is a video of _him_. Feral and savage, terrified and violent. It is a video of him trying to kill a girl and succeeding in killing a man.

He's a monster.

He's a mutt.

He's a murderer.

Death is the only answer, the only solution. He begged for it, in both cells, dreamed of it, courted it, and now it is the only thing to do. The obvious answer to all their problems (to his, so he will not have to look in the mirror and see a murderer looking back; to the team's, so they can accomplish their mission without worrying about being cut down by the boy at their backs; to _hers_ , so she will not have to look at him with that sad, tortured expression and delve up memories that are obviously unwelcome).

(Sometimes, he thinks that everything that went wrong, all the death and the suffering and the distance, can all be traced back to the first mistake: that there were two Victors lifted from the 74th arena. Sometimes, he thinks that he has just been waiting for death to find him, and watching as death takes its revenge for his elusiveness out on everyone else. Sometimes, gripping a chair and trying to sort truth from lie, he thinks that everything would be so much better if he had only died when he was supposed to; if he hadn't failed in even this most basic of tasks. He feels immortal, unkillable, but still so very breakable, and how is that fair? How is that right? But then Katniss curls into him in the night and her screams ease, she sees him in the light of day and her stern lips turn up in a smile, she takes his hand and tells him _Real_ and then Peeta thinks that his life is not a curse, but a miracle.)

But they are just as much his captors as they are his team (and certainly not allies in the Games, because then they would gladly kill one of their fellow tributes; except…except he offered this before, and Katniss…did not take it? She pulled out berries and said _Together_. No, she pointed her bow at him and left him behind when running to the Cornucopia. Or…he's not sure. If he weren't waiting to die, he'd ask, but there are more important things to consider). They will not kill him. They will not give him even the freedom of a tiny pill clutched in the palm of his hand.

He hates himself. He will not hurt them. They drag him behind them and watch him suspiciously, but he swears to himself that he will help them. If they are in danger, he will be the sacrificial lamb, the distraction, the scapegoat, the diversion, anything they need so long as he does not blink awake again and find that he has broken.

The cold eats him up from the inside out, his entire body fizzling with remnants of acid and hallucination. "Leave me!" he pleads. But she doesn't. She wraps her hands around his wrists, around his hands (he is ablaze). She presses her mouth to his (he is incandescent). She looks straight into his eyes and does not look away (he is as radiant as the sun).

"Stay with me," she begs. (A monster, on her knees begging. A mockingjay repeating back words that sound so very familiar, trapped on the ground, refusing to fly without him. A girl, just an ordinary girl with a braid and a bow, asking him to stay.)

" _Always_ ," he says, and for the first time, it does not feel like he is playing a part. It feels as if he is himself. Just Peeta. A Victor. A charmer. A manipulator. A boy in love. Useful, and remembered, and _needed_.

She bathes his wrists and wraps them tenderly (and how could he have ever believed her to be a mutt?). She shackles him up at his command, reluctant and worried for him (and how could he have ever believed her dangerous?). She lets him have death, cupped in his hand to be used at his own discretion, and begs him not to use it and hugs him (and how could he have ever thought he did not love her?).

She's the girl on fire, warming him from the inside out, bringing him back to life, waking him (the _real_ him) from his enforced stasis.

She's the mockingjay, flying ahead of him, toppling presidents and turning worlds upside down, inspiring him to try to be more, try to be enough to be what she needs.

But in the end, she's just a girl (and he remembers, a red dress, a ray of sun, two braids, a voice to stop the birds singing, and a little boy watching, open-mouthed; he remembers that he loved her before she was ever anything in the eyes of Panem). In the end, she's flesh and blood, muscle and bone, and all of it so very fragile. So very flammable.

The explosions rock the square and send body parts flying and there is blood on his face and his leg isn't working right, but Katniss is on fire. She's _literally_ on fire, flames licking up her back, along her legs and arms, charring her bow…and she isn't moving.

Peeta runs. He's warm, he's hot, he's scorching, there are tongues of fire biting at his heels, blisters bubbling up on his palms as he grabs her and cradles her to his chest (she's so small, so tiny, so helpless; so _precious_ ). He rolls her, his body falling on top of hers, and he's always been too close to her, always caught up in her wake, and he barely notices when the fire caresses his face, devours his Capitol disguise and black uniform. He only knows that Katniss is hurt, she's dying, she's fading, and he's supposed to be protecting her. He's supposed to keep her from going out.

But she's always been the girl on fire. And he? He's always been the boy watching from too far away (too close; not close enough).

So she burns. And he burns with her.

* * *

At breakfast, there is toast, sitting there on her plate next to the eggs. Bread browned (but not blackened) and covered with a thin amount of precious butter. Across from her, sitting at the table, is Peeta.

She cannot stop herself from flicking her eyes between the bread and the boy with the bread (if he still _is_ that boy). He doesn't say much. His eyes dart up, then dart away (like a young boy in school; like a Victor at a vote to bring back the Hunger Games). He stays in his seat, his arms held closely to his sides; he makes no sudden movements, and aside from a few pleasantries to Sae, stays mostly silent. Katniss aches to see him like this, so controlled, so wary (so afraid), but he is here, and before he leaves, he gives her a small, tentative smile.

(He planted primrose bushes in her sister's honor, and he brings bread every day, and his smiles grow warmer, his stays longer, and she remembers the hug in Tigris's shop, his arms steadying around her. She remembers someone dragging her from the flames of her sister's pyre. She remembers a boy, damaged and hurt beyond all repair, voting _No!_ immediately, without hesitation, gentleness and _goodness_ flaring in those horrified eyes. She remembers her teeth biting into a calloused hand, and two simple words that make her hope for a miracle.)

It took him eleven years to speak to her the first time. It took Cinna and Haymitch and Hunger Games and burned bread to make her pretend to be friends with him. It took him sacrificing his life over and over and over again (to public scrutiny, to lies, to Careers, to a blade, to infection, to blood loss, to starvation, to hundreds of things he could have avoided if he weren't trying to save her) and berries and a rebellion to get them engaged. It took losing him for her to realize how much she needs him.

So they go slow. Tentative. Simple. Like the days when her ankle was hurt, when he carried her up and down the stairs and sat beside her and sketched, and she could not look away from him and she began waiting for him to come back as soon as he left and dreading when he'd have to go as soon as he arrived.

He brings her bread, and when he remembers how to make them and what they mean to her, he brings her cheese buns. He sits with her at meal times (and it makes her think of that first time she and Gale brought back meat for District 13, how there was something different about the meals when people actually _enjoyed_ them). He smiles when she brings him squirrels back from her cautious hunting forays. He begins to talk to her, a little at a time, sometimes ending with _real or not real?_ and waiting for her to answer.

(But he listens to whatever she says, and he nods. He trusts her. He _chooses_ to trust her, and maybe he is not the boy with the bread, with the kindness and the bruise on his eye, twisting a nation to her side and making deals to spare her, but this trust is _important_. This means something, and he _is_ Peeta, because nobody else would ever be able to overcome the enormity and the cruelty of hijacking. No one else would ever be able to look at her with the soft, sweet, shy look that makes her blush and smile and shiver all at once.)

Slowly, slowly, carefully, they grow back together. He's learned to walk quieter (to be warier, quicker to expect the worst, slower to step between tenuous allies), and she learns to walk louder (so she doesn't have to see the instinctive fear in his eyes as he flinches away from her sudden appearances). They are both different, both vastly changed from the girl on fire and the boy with the bread, but their hands are clasped more often than not, and so they change together, and meet in the middle.

Her nightmares haunt her, leave her screaming and shaking, afraid to sleep, desperate with exhaustion. Her sister is burned into the back of her eyelids, following her into deep closets, shadowing her at mealtimes, haunting her when the sun sets. When Peeta first arrived, Katniss knows she was feral, hardly living, all instinct and reaction and defensiveness, and he seemed to realize it, bringing with him food to prove his harmlessness, offering her shy smiles to diffuse her instinctive anger, taming her so that she begins to smile back, to eat more, to _want_ to touch him.

It doesn't take her long to realize that Peeta is not entirely tame anymore either. He is still silent when his nightmares attack him, still withdrawn, but somedays he doesn't come to breakfast. Somedays, he retreats to his house, to lock the doors and close the windows and curl in over the savagery Snow planted inside him (to make himself a living shield against that darkness, trapping it in his mind, ensuring it does not rage outward at her). And when he comes back to her, he is quiet, wary, skittish. She learns to be slow, to speak gently, to hum under her breath until his muscles relax and he inches closer, closer, close enough for their hands to clasp. And eventually, she learns to jimmy open a window and walk into his room and pull his hands away from their painful grip on his own hair. She learns to wrap her fingers around his wrists and talk to him, quietly, softly, kindly.

(He has learned to walk like a hunter, to confront her directly, to stand in front of the exits and speak firmly, to lure her in with bread and food. She has learned to walk like a baker, to be subtle and soft, to always give him room to leave, to soothe his fears with her own presence and voice. It's almost ironic, how much they have learned to be like the other, Peeta silent and tentative, Katniss persistent and always talking.)

One day, she realizes she doesn't want to leave his home, with the ovens radiating warmth but hiding the sight of open flames (and Prim burning in their depths, Finnick writhing in their fumes, Boggs gone in an instant) and the smell of bread that has been infused into the walls themselves and the bright colors of paintings everywhere (only good paintings, beautiful and breathtaking; he hides the others away behind a locked door upstairs). She does not want to leave Peeta here, alone and vulnerable to attacks when he forgets what is real and not real. She doesn't want to go back to her house where echoes of Prim resound and shadows of her mom grow and memories of Gale can sometimes arise.

So she doesn't leave. She stays, through dinner, into the evening, long after there is any excuse (other than the truth) for why she lingers. Peeta watches her, out of the corner of his eye while he sketches a picture of Thresh, and in the glow of the lanterns, she sees his lips curve up in a smile. Soon, he sets his pencils down, and stands, and holds his hand out for her.

Easily, smoothly, their fingers twine together. He leads her upstairs to his room, and they curl up in each other's arms, and it is as if he never left her. As if she did not abandon him in the arena and he did not lose his mind and there were no stranglings or drawn arrows.

"You're Peeta," she whispers into the night (because his arms are strong and steady, even though they are thin and scarred; because his breath is warm and close, even though it is shakier and shallower than before; because he is here, he came back to her, and only Peeta has ever come back to her; he is _her_ Peeta).

"You're Katniss," he replies easily ( _Katniss_ , not Mockingjay, not Girl on Fire, not Victor, or any of a hundred other titles; just _Katniss_ , and a single tear slides down her cheek to fall on his shirt).

Haymitch smirks, but says nothing (she thinks he is happy for them). Sae smiles and nods and comes only occasionally to make sure they're still doing well. Katniss begins to hunt again in earnest after Peeta mentions the children and families returning to 12. Peeta begins to say things instead of ask them, begins to relax rather than tense when he hears her voice. Effie visits once or twice and talks a lot and says little and hugs them too tightly. Her mom calls and Dr. Aurelius tells her to make lists and Thom comes by to talk to Peeta about the process of rebuilding the town.

And every morning, there is toast with butter. Every afternoon, there is bread for sandwiches. Every evening, there are cheese buns beside the meat dish.

And eventually, in quiet moments and gentle days and dandelion summers, Katniss is happy.

She is happy, and with Peeta holding her hand, she is finally, deliciously full.

* * *

Peeta doesn't know much about history before the Dark Days, but he reads more as every year, old books are recovered and restored, and he has always loved old stories, so he thinks that it is always that mankind has been attracted to the beauty and the warmth of flames. He thinks people have congregated around quiet fires throughout all of history, to converse and to eat and to live. He thinks everyone longs to be close to the pretty, variegated tongues of heat, to feel them emanating warmth against skin, to smell the crispness of smoke, to let the light cloak their flaws and limn their strengths.

He is no different. From that first moment, in the halo of a sunbeam, he saw Katniss, and he was attracted to her warmth, her light, her radiance. The pouring rain on a cold day could not put out her flames, and when it tried, he fed her. She swept across a nation and reconfigured the landscape behind her. She lit up a blazing beacon in the sky for all the Districts to aspire toward. She reached farther, faster, encouraged by angry, ruthless puppeteers, and was burnt down to ash and soot, raining down cinders over the grave of her sister and so many others she dared to care for. When Peeta finally found his way back to her, she was nothing more than coals, barely there at all, black on the outside, but still red and orange and beautiful within.

"Besides," he tells Katniss, teasing, "don't you know pearls come from coal?"

She laughs and winds her arms around him (and his breath catches, because he still cannot believe she is his, she is here, she _wants_ to be with him) and says, "I have the only pearl I want."

And he laughs to hear her so free, so open, so happy. And he wraps his own arms around her (loving the way she melts into him; loving the softened expression when she feels his embrace; loving _her_ ) and kisses her.

He warms himself at her fire, and he feeds her when she is sputtering weakly, and he builds her up when she's drenched, and he breathes his own oxygen into her at night when the dark terrors try to overtake her, and he loves her in whatever form she takes. (It's been years since he's ever felt cold, since he's felt anything but warm and loved and never forgotten.) And when she is vacant and chilled, when he can see only the black of coals, he holds her close and whispers _Always_ and waits for her to come back to him.

She always does.

That's the thing about fire. It never completely goes away. It's always there, a spark, living in the heart she's placed in his ever-steadying hands. The conflagration is gone, the beacon faded, the sun-like radiance tamped down. In its place, it is a home hearth he tends, brilliant in its own way, beautiful and nurturing, not as dangerous but so much more welcoming. His hands have scars from ovens and pans and sharp teeth (his flesh is marked with the twisting trail of flames), but he doesn't mind. His mind is scarred, too, and sometimes he still is afraid and hurt and confused. But she presses herself close and curls her fingers over his wrists, and the darkness goes away, leaving him once more in the light.

He is happy.

He is warm.

He is loved.

So one day, he asks her, "Stay with me? Forever? Always?"

"Always," she says, and when she kneels before the fireplace and smiles up at him, Peeta knows he will never be cold (alone) again.

* * *

Food is a necessity, essential to keep her family breathing and existing, and Katniss has always seen it as that. Essential, but nothing beyond that. But with Peeta, food is more. It's laughing together in the kitchen, and throwing flour at each other, and specks of color on his hands and beauty on cakes. It's life and expression and happiness. It's a surprise breakfast in bed on a stormy day. It's a cupcake decorated like the knot of a tree just because ( _I have to keep my camouflage skills up to date somehow_ , he teases). It's art and hope and magic, all wrapped up in him, and it's okay to waste it sometimes in silly food fights because there will be more and because laughing, he says, is just as important as being full until dinnertime. (It's an unexpected can of lamb stew, in a war-torn Capitol, with hijacked memories screaming in his mind.)

He's so strange to her, so different, almost alien, and he still confuses her sometimes (she still studies his focused expression when he paints, the one where worlds are locked away behind open eyes, and loves that she still has so much to discover, and mourns that some of those worlds now are made of pain and agony and confusion). The way he paints his family and cries just as much for his mother as he does for his father and brothers. The insistence he has on making sure her birthday is special for her. The self-loathing and the shame he never quite manages to hide from her after she sings him back from that dark, frightening place in his mind. The way he never fails to light up when he sees her, every day, no matter what she's done to him in the past or what special day she's forgotten or how many years she can't bear to give him the children he wants. The way he loves her, when everything in their lives has proven he should hate her.

"How could I hate you?" he asks her, a crease in his brow as the sun pours liquid gold into his hair and a dusting of flour floats in the air above his hands. "It's like hating light."

But when Gale shows up on the television or sends her a letter or Katniss mentions him, Peeta grows silent and still, as wary as when he first came back to her (as if Gale could ever mean more than Peeta _now_ , when even when Gale was everything she wanted—the forest and the rebellion and her family and her uncomplicated life from before the Games—and Peeta was everything that scared her—hope and happiness and beauty and life and kindness and selflessness and a love that can destroy her—she still chose Peeta).

 _I need you_ , she told him, on a day long gone, when he offered her a future and she chose him instead. How can he not understand that? How can he not realize?

Eventually, she realizes why he doesn't. She is a creature of needs, fixated on necessity and survival. But Peeta is a being of beauty, mesmerized by things she once considered luxuries, extravagances. Peeta does not care about what he needs, but he dreams of wants and wishes that make her smile when he paints them in words for her while she lies on his chest by their lake and they watch the clouds dance above them. She told him she needed him, and he knows she does (there are still nightmares, still visions of Prim in agony in fire, still screams that only he can silence and soften and soothe away), and to her, that is enough of a confession. But for Peeta…for Peeta, it is only half of it.

(Gale said she would choose who she couldn't survive without, but he was wrong, and she can't exactly blame him because he doesn't know. He hasn't been alchemized from the inside out by Peeta, hasn't been infused with his spirit of kindness and generosity. He hasn't learned that there is so much more than simply surviving. That Peeta doesn't just survive, curled up in a chair in a cold house; he _lives_ , every day, no matter how much it hurts, because he wants to smile and laugh and love.)

One night, she smooths her hand over his arm and up to his face, brings his lips to hers, and whispers the words she has practiced all day in the woods. "I need you, Peeta. I _want_ you."

 _I love you_ , she means to say, but she doesn't get that far. His mouth covers hers, his hands are scorching down her sides, and when the sun is rising, she tells him _Real_.

So when he asks her to stay with him always, when he bakes her a loaf of bread with nuts and raisins in it, she sits in front of a fire (and does not see Prim), and she helps him burn the bread.

(She thinks they are married already, thinks that Peeta asked for Haymitch's permission when he demanded that she survive the Quell. She thinks she accepted his proposal when she said _I'll allow it_. She thinks the ceremony was on a beach beside a circular sea and a deadly jungle, when he swore to give her everything and she said _I do_ and took his pearl into her own hand and kissed him as if there would be no tomorrow, when he put his hand on her stomach and spoke of a future and she dreamed of him in it.)

For her, their story began with burned bread. It almost ended a hundred times (a hundred lifetimes, and maybe now she can finally deserve him), and now here they are. A new beginning. The best beginning.

He feeds her the bread, and stares at her with those bright, kind eyes of his (no bruises this time, because she will protect him and she will not fail again). She feeds him the bread (the first time since a can of chicken soup that _she_ gets to feed _him_ ), and she knows her eyes are just as bright as his, even if they are not quite as kind.

"Katniss," he says (and that's all, but it is his own declaration and confession and vow all in one).

When he kisses her, she tastes burned bread.

She tastes hope.

She tastes life.

She tastes _Peeta_.

And because of that, one day, she looks at him and says, "I'm ready, Peeta. I want to have children with you."

His smile, all surprised and awed and _happy_ , is her answer, and Katniss knows that she will never want for (never need) anything ever again.

* * *

The End


End file.
